There is currently much attention being given to patents as intellectual property assets. Patents may be used for either offensive or defensive purposes, and may provide their owner the opportunity to generate licensing revenue. Indeed, some companies generate hundreds of million of dollars each year from patent licensing activity. A strong patent portfolio may give a company a competitive edge in the marketplace and can be helpful when making business deals, such as mergers and acquisitions, and even when marketing products. For this and other reasons, companies and other organizations are filing an increasing number of patent applications every year.
However, the larger an organization's patent portfolio becomes, the more difficult it becomes to maintain and manage it. Firstly, maintenance fees must be paid periodically to the Patent Office to prevent a patent from lapsing. Since certain patents in the portfolio may become obsolete due to changes in the marketplace, technological innovation, and so on, organizations with large portfolios typically employ strategists to periodically assess their portfolios and identify which patents should be maintained and which should be dropped. Secondly, a company may wish to compare a competitor's product line against its own patent portfolio, in order to identify infringing activity. However, searching a patent portfolio to identify key patents can be a time consuming process. For this reason, one goal of a search of a patent portfolio may be to rank some or all of the patents, or possibly to identify a subset of the portfolio that can be regarded as “fundamental patents”. Likewise, one company may wish to examine the portfolio of another company to assess that portfolio's strengths and weaknesses, e.g., prior to acquiring that company or entering into a product line in which that company already has a stronghold.
For these reasons alone, effectively managing a patent portfolio can be important activity in today's marketplace, especially for companies with large patent portfolios. Unfortunately, patent portfolio management can be expensive, since teams of lawyers and analysts may be called upon to do detailed analysis, which in the end may still be somewhat subjective. Accordingly, a tool to help automate this analysis would be desirable.